Greece
Zakynthos
We visited in September
Pack beach shoes for the children. The coves round Agios Nikolaos, at the northern tip of Zakynthos, are small and pebbled or rocky, the island having given its sand to the resorts further down the east coast. What the north has instead is the water, aquamarine in the shallows and turquoise beyond it, and wading out into it, rubber soles and all, was brilliant.
We went for the first two weeks of September, with young children and their grandparents, and it was a very good time to go: late summer, the crowds and prices of July and August thinning out, and a sea that is warmest in August, at around 26°C, and stays swimmable into October. From November most of the island shuts for the winter, the boat trips with it, and the rain comes back in earnest.
Stay in the north. It is mountainous and empty, 45 to 50 minutes from the airport and far from everything else on the island, and what there is to stay in is villas and a handful of boutique hotels. With three generations in the party, villas suited us better than a hotel. The north-east coast, from Tsilivi up to Alykes, is where the sand is, along with the package hotels and the beach bars that keep going after dark. The south coast is Laganas Bay, the loudest resort strip on Zakynthos and, with some irony, one of the largest loggerhead turtle nesting grounds in the Mediterranean. We would not necessarily go to either.
Agios Nikolaos is a small harbour, sheltered from the north wind by an islet of the same name, and the boats leave from it: small ones along the white cliffs to the Blue Caves under Cape Skinari, and on to the cliffs above Navagio, Shipwreck Beach, about an hour away. Navagio can also be looked down on from the clifftop viewpoint, by road through Volimes and Anafonitria. The sulphur springs at Xigia and the beach at Makris Gialos are a short drive. For somewhere so empty there are a lot of beautiful restaurants, several of them on the water. And for anyone who finds even this end of Zakynthos too busy, two ferries a day cross from the harbour to Pessada on Kefalonia in summer.
- Best months
- May, June and September
- Avoid
- November to April, when most hotels, tavernas and boat trips close for winter and the sea is too cold for swimming
- Nearest airport
- Zakynthos (ZTH), Dionisios Solomos Airport
- Transfer
- about 15 minutes to the north-east coast and Zakynthos Town; 45 to 50 minutes to Agios Nikolaos and the north
Neighbourhoods
- Zakynthos Town
- The Vasilikos peninsula
- The south coast
- The west
Where to stay
5 hotels
5 hotels
Grown-up & familyEmerald Villas & Suites
££Zakynthos, Greece
A stone villa with its own pool and someone else to do the cleaning, five minutes' walk up the hill from the little harbour at Agios Nikolaos.
Grown-up & familyLesante Cape Resort & Villas
£££Zakynthos, Greece
Grass grows on the roofs of the stone suites at Lesante Cape, a new village on a Zakynthos hillside with a chapel and a folklore museum on its square.
Grown-upOlea All Suite Hotel
££Zakynthos, Greece
A 4,000-square-metre pool curls round an island of centuries-old olive trees on the hill above Tsilivi, with the Ionian beyond its far edge.
Grown-up & familyThe Peligoni Club
£££Zakynthos, Greece
Sailing dinghies go out from a shack on the rocky shore of northern Zakynthos, and a water taxi runs along the coast to lunch at a seafront taverna.
Grown-up & familyVilla Uranos di Gioia
£££Zakynthos, Greece
A three-bedroom villa in the hills of northern Zakynthos, with a swing chair under a pergola of rough timber and an 18-metre infinity pool pointed at the sunrise.
Where to eat
5 restaurants
Mandrakia Tavern Snack-Cafe
We ate there
The north · Greek, seafood
Snack bar by name and a proper restaurant by any other measure, on the water at the port, and so good we went back a few times.
The Old Windmill
We ate there
The north · Greek
An old windmill in the hill village of Askos, about ten minutes' drive up from Agios Nikolaos, run by Panos and his family.
